Harding, Nancy

Abstract [en]

Countless managers in the USA, UK and other countries are embarking on leadership learning and development activities to support their roles and identities as leaders (Day, 2011; Storey, 2011). There is a belief that the deluge of publications and the investment in leadership development will create managers with the skills and characters of leaders, capable of guiding organizations through the crises of the 21st century global market. Such learning and development programs frequently espouse the value of dominant discourses such as transformational leadership, with its ‘heroic’ assumptions that romanticize individual leaders and underestimate the significance of context and relationships. Furthermore, they often neglect critical engagement with the complex conditions, processes and consequences of leadership dynamics in contemporary organizations. Recently, critical (and especially poststructural) approaches to researching and conceptualizing leadership have emerged, which although still being outnumbered by mainstream accounts (Ford, 2006; Ford, Harding and Learmonth, 2008; Jackson and Parry, 2011), are increasingly influential. However, discourses emerging from the more critical approaches have not yet had time to be absorbed into leadership learning and development activities. This symposium brings together critical leadership theorists who will explore ways of changing leadership pedagogy.